Early Relationships and Mental Health Series
CPD Credits
12
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Partially Recorded
Time (UK)
3:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Standard
£200.00
Trainee/NHS
£170
Early Relationships and Mental Health Series
Friday, January 17, 2025 - Friday, March 28, 2025

Early Relationships and Mental Health Series

Insights from experts in the field of Psychoanalytic Parent Infant Psychotherapy 

With Dr. Beatrice Beebe, Alison Bruce, Dr. Arietta Slade, Inge-Martine Pretorius, Fatima Martinez de Solar, Teresa Sarmiento , Tessa Baradon, Björn Salomonsson, Dr. Yvonne Osafo, Anna Godfrey, Michela Biseo & Alice Jacobs Waterfall (Facilitator)

Led by international experts in the field of parent infant psychotherapy this six week course will make vivid links between our earliest relational experiences and how they profoundly shape our future mental health, emotional well-being and capacity to form fulfilling adult relationships. Whether you're working psychotherapeutically with parents and infants, children, couples, or individuals or are part of England’s Family Hubs and Start for Life program, the principles explored in this series will be relevant and enriching for your work.

The series will demonstrate how through embodied, micro communications between parent and infant the infant’s sense of self develops. These experiences are shaped by m-other’s internal and external circumstances and their capacity to be ‘with’ the baby. We will begin with Dr Beatrice Beebe’s groundbreaking work, the micro-analysis of parent-infant communication through video and audio recordings slowed down frame by frame to ‘see’ and experience what is really happening in the dyad, you may be surprised!

Dr Arietta Slade named by Peter Fonagy as ‘one of the world’s best experts in this field’ will offer the second lecture on developing the capacity for reflective functioning and mentalization. Other sessions will explore micro and often invisible processes of containing, tolerating not knowing, working through, rupture and repair alongside the macro level impact of broader issues such as race, cultural differences, intergenerational trauma, particularly in refugee and asylum-seeking populations.

This series is developed in collaboration with the National Centre for Supervision of Parent-Infant Relationships (NCSPIR). NCSPIR offers clinical supervision to practitioners and their supervisors working with parents and infants as part of the UK government’s Family Hubs and Start for Life program, which aims to improve early years services for families with children aged 0 to 2.

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Programme

Friday, January 17, 2025

15.30 Introductions and Housekeeping
15.35 Dr Beatrice Beebe 
Microanalysis of Parent-Infant Communication: How can we see what we don’t see? 

In this talk, Beatrice Beebe will present her pioneering work on microanalysis of parent-infant interactions at 4 months, demonstrating subtle, often unseen communication patterns. Because human nonverbal communication is so fast, many subtle but critical movements cannot be seen by the naked eye in real time. Slowed viewing or frame-by-frame analysis is essential. For example, an infant who looks withdrawn and gaze-avoidant in real time is discovered during the frame-by-frame analysis to be continually reaching for his mother despite looking away. This discovery changes the treatment approach of the mother-infant therapist. Moreover, the insights of microanalysis have allowed us to identify rapid out-of-awareness patterns of communication at 4 months that predict secure vs. disorganized attachment at one year.

Because Dr. Beebe’s films are confidential, they cannot be recorded. Therefore, we urge you to attend this seminar on zoom. There will no circulated recording of this lecture.

17.15 Q&A and Discussion with Participants
17.30 End

Friday, January 31, 2025

15:30 Introductions and Housekeeping 
15:35 Containing, Tolerating Not-Knowing, Working Through
The establishment and running of a viable parent/infant support group.

Part one of this seminar will describe the application of the psychoanalytic frame and the adaptation of methodology from infant observation practices, in the setting up and running of a parent/infant support group in a community setting. Alison will consider the impact of infantile anxieties induced and will  highlight the importance of Bion’s ideas of containment, Keat’s notion of negative capability and Britton’s third position in the holding and delivery of the project. A clinical case example  illustrating difficulties with post-natal depression, unconscious infantile anxieties and aggressions will be described. Alison will reflect on the projective processes present in the material and illustrate how her own struggles in the counter-transference are an essential part of the work.

16:20 Q&A
16: 40 Part Two

In this second part of the seminar Alison will present further clinical examples from the project illustrating how prior perinatal losses can impact the early parent child relationship. Finally participants will be invited to consider some of the challenges, difficulties and obstacles that can arise in providing a service such as this within a local community setting 

17:10 Q&A
17.30 End 

Friday, February 28, 2025

15.30 Introductions and Housekeeping
15.35 Minding the Baby

Dr.  Slade will present a framework for clinical work that grew out her decades’ work directing Minding the Baby, an interdisciplinary home visiting program aimed at enhancing attachment and mentalizing in parents with histories of complex trauma, adversity, and extreme stress.  A history of severely disrupted attachments poses unique challenges to mentalizing and thus to parenting, insofar as threat and dysregulation preclude intimacy and attunement. The framework – the Relational Foundations of Reflection - is aimed at building secure attachments and mentalizing from the ground up.  The path to reflection begins with the establishment of safety, regulation, and trust.  This begins with the clinician, upon whose safety, regulation and reliability parents and children depend.  From their own sense of security, the clinician can then find ways to diminish traumatized parents’ sense of danger and dysregulation, and to create a relationship that will hold the parent and the complexity of their feelings.  Only then can the parent begin to provide safety, regulation, and build a trusting relationship with the child.  

17.00 Q&A and Discussion with Participants

 Friday, March 14, 2025

15.30 Introductions and Housekeeping
15.35 Therapeutic parent, baby and toddler playgroup for refugees and asylum seekers: Bringing psychoanalysis to the community

This presentation will describe establishing and running a therapeutic playgroup for refugees and asylum-seeking parents, their babies and toddlers. The psychoanalytic theoretical underpinnings of the model will be described, as well as the adaptations necessary for this population that have experienced loss and trauma. The therapeutic interventions will be described and illustrated A case study and video clips.

16.50 Short Break
17.00 Q&A and Discussion with Participants
17.30 End 

Friday, March 21, 2025

15.30 Introductions and Housekeeping
15.35 Rupture and Repair in Therapist Patient Relationships: Part 1

Pioneers of infant research such as Stern, Trevarthen, Tronick and Beebe have contributed to understanding how the parent and infant co-construct their relationship in micro-events of interaction. Such interactions, largely embodied and too fleeting to reach conscious reflection, move in an ordinary way between states of ‘matching’, ‘mismatching’ and ‘repair’ between the partners (Tronick, 2007; Cohn & Tronick, 1989).  Some mismatches, however, create a rupture which has the potential of negatively influencing the course of the relationship. In this talk, I will focus on such ruptures, which occur – inevitably – in infant mental health practice as in other situations of human relationships. I draw upon research into clinical process in psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy (PPIP), in which we examined the characteristics of ruptures and their repair at the micro-level of the here-and-now in therapy sessions. Video material will be shown to illustrate how the very processes that create the rupture also frame interactive repair, this material will not be included in the recording but a write up of it will. I will argue that while the research base was therapy, the findings are relevant to all practitioners working with infants and their parents.

16.50 Short Break
17.00 Q&A
17.30 End

Friday, March 28, 2025

15.00 Dr Yvonne Osafo and Anna Godfrey
Unconscious Bias, Race, and Culturally-Informed Practice in Parent-Infant Psychotherapy

This talk invites psychotherapists to critically engage with the pervasive impact of unconscious racial bias in clinical work, particularly within the context of parent-infant psychotherapy. By reflecting on how race, culture, and identity shape both therapeutic dynamics and outcomes, participants will develop a deeper understanding of the implicit biases that may influence their clinical interventions and relationships with families from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. Focusing specifically on parent-infant psychotherapy, the seminar will address the complex intersection of race, trauma, and early relational patterns, offering culturally-informed approaches to repair and nurture healthy attachments. Participants will be encouraged to explore their own biases and consider how these may affect their ability to attune to the lived experiences of parents and children from marginalised communities.

15.45 Q&A
16.00 Short Break
16.10 Michela Biseo
Mixed Heritage, Mixed Feelings: Psychoanalytic Parent Infant Psychotherapy during the coronavirus pandemic, aiming to interrupt intergenerational racial trauma.

Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy (PPIP) by a white psychotherapist with a mixed heritage single mother and newborn boy will be discussed.  The baby was already showing signs of a disrupted attachment relationship. Due to the pandemic, therapy began in person but was interrupted. Much of the work was online.  Racial violence in society was being highlighted in this turbulent period. This offered an opportunity for exploration of the parent's own experiences of trauma, particularly racial, colorist abuse. The therapy was able to interrupt the repetition of trauma and help restore the parent infant relationship to a more secure, loving one.   Michela will reflect on the importance of self reflection in the therapist as well as cultural humility and the use of cultural 'ports of entry' to explore the impact of  'Ghosts in society ' (C.Ghosh Ippen) as well as the more traditional Parent Infant Psychotherapy approach of addressing the 'Ghosts in the nursery' (S. Fraiberg). 

16.55 Q&A
17.10 Q&A with all speakers
17.30 End

Dr. Beatrice Beebe

Dr Beatrice Beebe is a developmental/clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst doing basic research on mother-infant communication. She did her dissertation and postdoctoral research fellowship with Dr. Daniel Stern. She is known for her research on microanalysis of early infant-parent communication and its implications for attachment and cognition. She is a Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology at the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University, and the director of the Communications Science Lab at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI).  Her work helped established the importance of nonverbal communication in infant development. Beebe and Lachmann have made unique and fundamental contributions in describing the relevance of mother-infant communication for therapist-patient communication in adult treatment. 

She has a YouTube account with documentary films: //youtube.com/@dr.beatricebeebe8658

Dr. Arietta Slade

Arietta Slade, Ph.D. is Professor Adjunct at the Yale Child Study Center, and Professor Emerita in the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at the City University of New York. An internationally recognized theoretician, clinician, researcher, and teacher, she has published widely on reflective parenting, the clinical implications of attachment theory, the development of parental mentalization, and the relational contexts of early symbolization, and regularly presents her work to national and international audiences. She has been co-directing Minding the Baby, an interdisciplinary reflective parenting home visiting program for high-risk mothers, infants, and their families, for over 20 years.  This program – based at the Yale Child Study Center and School of Nursing - is one of only 18 certified “evidence-based” home visiting programs in the United States. Dr. Slade is author, with Lois S. Sadler, Tanika Eaves, and Denise L. Webb of Enhancing Attachment and Reflective Parenting in Clinical Practice: A Minding the Baby Approach (Guilford Press, 2023), with Jeremy Holmes of Attachment in Therapeutic Practice (SAGE Publications, 2018), and editor, with Jeremy Holmes of the six volume set, Major Work on Attachment (SAGE Publications, 2013), with Elliot Jurist and Sharone Bergner, of Mind to Mind: Infant Research, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis (Other Press, 2008), and with Dennie Wolf, of Children at Play (Oxford University Press, 1994).

Tessa Baradon

Tessa Baradon came from the field of public health to child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. She has worked in the public and private sectors and has been responsible for the development and provision of psychotherapy services for parents and infants in the NHS and The Anna Freud Centre where she led in the development of a psychoanalytic parent infant psychotherapy (PPIP) modality now adopted in many countries. Baradon's most recent publication is ‘Psychoanalytic Parent Infant Psychotherapy and Mentalization’, co-authored with Chloe Campbell, Routledge 2023 

Dr. Yvonne Osafo

Dr Yvonne Osafo is a child adolescent and adult psychotherapist and parent-infant psychoanalytic psychotherapist.  She specializes in early intervention from pregnancy to age two, the first 1001 critical days of life.  As a Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for Early Years Intervention and Prevention, she has travelled the USA and Scandinavia to learn from best practice in parent-infant psychotherapy and returned to the UK to share her findings with her colleagues.  She completed her doctorate in psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the University of Essex and teaches parent-infant psychotherapy (IPP) and baby observation at Terapia Institute, and baby observation at the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education (IATE).

Dr Osafo is a member of the Executive of the UKCP College for Children and Young People where she chaired the IPP sub-committee, which has developed standards of training for Infant-Parent Psychotherapists. She is the founder of Au Milieu, a charity that upskills psychotherapists to become infant parent psychotherapists.

Anna Godfrey

Anna has been working in Croydon’s Early Intervention Services as an infant-parent psychotherapist for the past 8 years. As a registered UKCP member, she has sat on the UKCP Infant-Parent Psychotherapy sub-committee and contributed to the development of IPP training standards. Her background in literature and the arts led her to begin therapeutic training with CYP at the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education (IATE). She then went on to complete her MA in child and adolescent psychotherapy at Terapia. Anna has worked with a culturally diverse range of clients of different ages in a variety of South London settings. Before her work in Croydon, she set up a counselling service for young people in a sixth form college to respond to the increasing mental health need. Anna is passionate about addressing this need through early intervention infant-family relationship support. Her community-based therapeutic work, as part of a wide multidisciplinary team across Croydon, seeks to recognise diversity, identify barriers and empower minority infant-parent relationships. Anna is developing a research interest in intergenerational racialized trauma, looking to develop a culturally strengths-based approach in her work as an infant-parent psychotherapist with families of all cultures.

Michela Biseo

Michela Biseo is a Child & Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist (ACP) and Psychoanalytic parent infant Psychotherapist (BPC). She has been in this field for over 20 years and led a community based PIP service at the Anna Freud Centre for many years. She now is in private practice. She is Course Director of the PPIP  two-year specialist training at the British Psychotherapy Foundation.She is also a Senior Tutor on the ACP accredited  UCL/Anna Freud Doctorate in Independent Psychoanalytic Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy (IPCAPA) at the bpf.  She teaches, supervises, and consults to therapists and new and established PIP teams, in the UK and abroad. 

Inge-Martine Pretorius

Inge-Martine Pretorius, PhD (Microbiology) and DPsych (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy), qualified as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre (AFC) in London. She is a Visiting Professor at Vienna University and a Lecturer at University College London. For over 20 years she worked at the Anna Freud Centre; as Clinical Lead of the Parent-Toddler service, facilitating a therapeutic Parent-Toddler Group and Observation Seminars; organising and teaching the AFC-UCL MSc Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Child Development Course and curating Anna Freud’s Hampstead War Nursery Archives. She currently works in Private Practice and for the National Health Service, running a Child Psychotherapy Service in a nursery school in a deprived area of London. She has published in the field of molecular genetics and psychoanalysis. Inge is the Research Consultant and a clinical supervisor of the therapeutic playgroup at 10 Windsor Walk.

Fatima Martinez del Solar

Fatima Martinez del Solar is a Psychoanalyst and Fellow British Psychoanalytic Society. Fatima facilitated a Parent-toddler group at the Anna Freud Centre for some years before establishing and running a therapeutic parent, baby and toddler group in Peckham which ran for 15 years. She currently works in Private Practice and at 10 Windsor Walk. Fatima is the Clinical Lead of the therapeutic playgroup project and offers weekly clinical supervision to staff at 10 Windsor Walk.

Teresa Sarmiento

Teresa Sarmiento is a Specialist Parent Infant Psychotherapist who works in the National Health Service (NHS) and in private practice. Teresa initially trained as a Clinical Psychologist and later completed the Specialist Psychoanalytic Parent Infant Training at the Anna Freud Centre. She is the Deputy for a Parent Infant Psychology Service within the Early Years Team in the NHS, supporting parents’ mental health and their relationship with their babies during the Perinatal period. Teresa has been a co-facilitator of the therapeutic playgroup since it was established at 10 Windsor Walk.

Alice Jacobs Waterfall

Alice Jacobs Waterfall is the Head of TR Together. A former conference producer, she retrained at Tavistock Relationships, completing their diploma in Couple and Individual Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in 2015. She has responsibility for creating and developing TR Together, a TR initiative created to extend and enhance the centre’s continuing professional development offer with a focus on developing new skills and deepening knowledge in community. As Content Director at Confer Alice enjoyed collaborating with many great practitioners across a wide range of modalities and themes and looks to incorporate these valuable insights in to the development of TR Together. 

Alison Bruce

Alison Bruce, is a Child, Adolescent and Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. Alison trained in New York City at NYU (New York University) and subsequently at IPTAR (Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research). She worked for thirteen years at a Child Guidance Center in Brooklyn where she ran a parent infant group. On returning to London in 2015 she worked for five years in a West London CAMHS team and established a parent infant group in the local community, now in its seventh year.  She completed further psychoanalytic training in couples work at Tavistock Relationships where she was subsequently a visiting clinician. Alison has taught, supervised and been infant observation lead for Masters programs at New York and Birkbeck Universities as well as co-led work discussion groups on the parental couple for the Association of Child Psychotherapists. She is currently a seminar lead and tutor for The Tavistock and Portman Trust and is a Supervisor for the National Centre for the Supervision of Parent Infant relationships. She has an independent practice in West London.

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